Necessity is the mother of taking chances. Mark Twain.
“When you get to the Parma Station go to the café just outside such and such exit and wait there where somebody will come and pick you up.” These were the simple instructions. The café in question was the sort of place with a pinball machine that looked like Noah had used it on the ark and where patrons didn’t so much walk to the bar as lurch towards it. People didn’t come in, characters entered.
This scene is particularly memorably etched because it began a journey for the two travellers – Tony and Warren, two quipping bad jokers raised on different sides of the Pond in Jewish families and who shared two passions – tennis and arts workshops. Both also under the thrall of a particular spell. Namely, the impression, and very reasonably formed suspicion, that Workshop is a form of arts practice. In other words that there are specific elements and qualities to a workshop that makes it distinctive from other ways of learning or exploring creativity. Each of us had invested time in researching this idea. Warren with in a thesis for his Doctorate and me, in a series of interviews, a thesis for my Master’s Degree and running events for artists. The theory held enough water for us to be meeting like undercover agents in a bust, following thin instructions to be in a café outside Bologna station and wait for others to arrive.
The trigger for this encounter was Warren’s suggestion to write a book together. This suggestion was made many years before this meeting but, with a persistence known only to a few human beings, Warren followed up with a call after a gap in communication of at least 5 years and, for me completely out of the blue, said, “let’s write the book now!” By then Warren had tenure at a university in Montreal, whereas my living was still made project to project as a freelancer running The Moveable Feast Workshop Co. So, when Warren suggested that we start on the book, I was a little trepidatious. One feature of the hand to mouth existence of the freelance workshop artists is that one becomes the servant of necessity. And, as is widely known, necessity gives birth to invention – even if it doesn’t always take care of it afterwards.
We invented a project called ‘Mindfield’. We would collaborate to run a series of workshops on both sides of the Pond. And then we would create an ‘Atlas of Workshop’ – a travelogue of the geography, events, encounters and experiences. In so doing, we would draw out the commonalities of the Workshop form. No small undertaking and one that began in a setting straight out of an Italian Damien Runyon in Parma.
We had decided that the place to start our journey into the heart of Workshop was to participate rather than facilitate. We signed up for a week long workshop course on’ The Joker” at a collective between Parma and Bologna in Italy. Nothing to do with Batman or because we are people who negotiate life by traversing from one bad joke to the next but because The Joker, in this instance, is the key facilitator in the participatory theatre of Augustus Boal called ‘Theatre of The Oppressed’.
The title of this theatre stems directly from an influential book by fellow Brazilian Paulo Friere entitled ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’. The basic premise of British and European schooling he calls the “Banking Model” of education. The teacher has knowledge, the students are empty vessels and the teacher deposits their knowledge into the students who are then examined on how much of the teacher’s knowledge they have been able to keep in their account. Friere says that this sort of education maintains the status quo of rich and poor and oppressor and oppressed. It’s an oppressive model. Friere’s solution he calls ‘Problem Solving’. This involves the students as participant in knowledge creation through dialogue with the teacher and each other. This participation Friere calls dialogical. The playing field of knowledge is levelled and shared and so is the power in that field.
Inspired by Friere, Boal created a theatre where the audience, whom he characterised as “spectactors” enter the drama to solve a problem set up by a group of actors. A problem immediately arose when Boal took his theatre to address the problem of oppression by landowners in a rural community. The agricultural workers were so impressed by the play that they wanted the actors to arm up and join them immediately to shoot the landowners. Boal realised that conventions needed setting up for Theatre of the Oppressed to be a theatrical form. Someone was needed to ensure that these conventions were followed and to facilitate the intervention. He called this someone The Joker – a character that appears in many different guises across the history of world theatre. Roughly, that’s the facilitating role that was being explored in the workshop Warren and I were going in Italy.
In the café, Warren, who is immensely talented at making quick connections, was already chatting to another participant, a drama teacher from Malta. The three of us wondered what the next part of this mysterious location for a first encounter might bring and when and where the pick-up might happen. It happened that we got picked up and whisked off towards the collective where the workshop was happening. Warren and I had arranged accommodation a little bit away from the venue because we wanted to compare notes each night on what we had noticed across the day.
Here are some of my take away memories and reflections on that first experience in Mindfield.
BEGINNING A WORKSHOP
“At the beginning of a workshop session nobody knows what is going to happen. There is one person who knows the aims of the session, but this person doesn’t know how these aims are going to be reached. They [the workshop leader] generate everything and really you are there as a guarantor, that’s how I feel, that groups need a sort of guarantee, they need money in the bank, they need to know that they’ve got capital, and if they feel they’ve got capital, then they can get on with their group creating business.”
The workshop began with the facilitator asking if anybody wanted to offer an icebreaking exercise to get the ball rolling. One thing I have learned about workshops is that they have the potential to be gut-wrenching, excruciating experiences where people are thinking “just let me out” or heart-warming journeys in which personal discovery and learning a skill coincide. Icebreakers are exemplars of these two opposite possibilities. Another thing I have learnt about leading workshops is that the moment that it is important for the leader to lead off. In that workshop a woman, who was not shy to come forward, said she’d had a great beginning in a workshop just last week. The group were told to all go to one end of the room, stand against a wall and then randomly step forward and sing our names dramatically to the rest of the group.
This was an excruciating ice-breaker. Not only because it was not led by the leader so no “capital in the bank’ was established but because it was such an inauthentic way to say hello to each other. Having relinquished control at the beginning in a faux democratic way, the leader had allowed anything to happen and was duly obliged.
PARTICIPANTS
Workshop is a place where we explore sanity within a transient community.
There is an intensity to a good workshop that brings you close to the individuals that you share the experience with. A feature of my life after that first congress in Bergen where Warren and I met, has been much more contact with an international community of artists. In Italy the international mix was a rich variety. When W.B. Yeats watched children at play he wrote, ‘How can we tell the dancer from the dancer?” The workshop is the people in it. Memorable moments can happen at any time with people. I remember games that made us laugh, exercises that made us think, challenges that brought us together and most of all, the whole group coming out of the studio where the work took place into the communal dining room. We sat round a long, communal, wooden table which soon was replete with all sort of bowls full of culinary delights. The seating was random so often you sat next to someone different and as the week developed, people made an effort to sit next to someone they hadn’t chatted to before. Connections are made quickly and last, either in real on-going relationship or in the memory.
The first meeting with the woman from Malta springs to mind. Also, a one to one exercise in which we exchanged stories. Then played them back to the teller but as the teller. The teller could then question you, who had been the listener but had now become the teller. I remember working with a French theatre director and when I became him in the second part of the exercise to tell his story back, he could then ask me (as him) questions. I can’t remember all the details but I do recall being asked questions about his grandmother. When I’d finished answering his questions, he was gobsmacked. “How could I possibly know all those things about his family’s life?” Of course, I didn’t and don’t. I guess there was something about the listening and embodiment of my partner’s tale that made that moment of insight possible. It didn’t happen evenly across the group in other partnerships. It never does. The dynamics and combinations in any group are diverse and incredible. However, deep connections do get made and stories are told and reimagined through the expressions and explorations that happen.
There are these individual moments but there are also moments when the group coalesce into a single unit like an audience spontaneously applauding at a show or a crowd when a goal is scored – common purpose can descend in an extraordinary way. Sometimes games, the right ones at the right time, can facilitate the presence of the group becoming a unified whole.
PLAY
Transformation is the essence of the creative process. It’s making something that has never existed before, whether it is bringing together existing elements in new ways or whether it is something completely original. Workshop is absolutely about not being in the same place as you were when you walked into the room.
Play is a 4-letter word with a lot of play contained within in its flexible walls. It can donate a play as in theatre; a mode of doing something as in a playful way; or a lack of rigidity as in a material having a lot of play. In the arts and in education, it’s a word that can cause problems. I remember after one workshop in Canada, after being told by a graduate student that she had just had the best day in her entire university career, a lecturer saying, “well just because they were having fun, doesn’t mean they learnt anything.” Fun and learning, play and work are often posited as opposites. Of course, the opposite of what that lecturer said is also true, “it doesn’t mean they are not learning either.”
A vivid memory of that first workshop in Italy were the games we played. There were a lot. I remember being a teddy bear that could only move in one direction. In pairs, one to set in motion and the other to move like a mechanical teddy bear. The room was suddenly full of wind up teddies, bumping into walls and each other and desperate controllers trying to reset the direction so that ‘their bear’ could move freely again into an open space.
Unlike the act of singing one’s name to a group of strangers, we knew each other and we were happy to be teddy bears, bash into walls, laugh together and learn new techniques. Amongst the teddies was a man who had had to crawl down tunnels to defuse mines. He wanted to tell that story with an illustrated slide show. He asked me to narrate the slides for him. So, from a station café to name songs to communal meals to teddies to mines to mysterious intuiting the life of another, the unexpected arises in the explorations and a motley crew of individual strangers become a group that share life stories and create a single new one that is unique – that is a workshop.
Workshop was the subject of our journey and now, nearly 10 years after that Italian sortie, I am going to commit some reflections on that journey on this blog.
Every workshop is a story and it’s an original story and it’s a story written there and new completely and it’s never been thought of before.
All quotes from The Workshop interviews 2001 (apart from Mark Twain whom I never met)